Linking Sessions With Structure

As I have stated in the past, there are two forms of gamification, content and structural. While these can both be applied to individual sessions, you can also apply an overarching gamified structure that links in all of the sessions. This can be achieved several ways and uses the exact same elements as I have been using already in my plans.

A lot of structural gamification already exists in the world with regards to young people and learning. Star charts for good work or good behaviour, sticks on exemplary pieces of work, and displaying attendance percentages in common areas. These are all examples of Kapp’s gamification elements PBL’s (Points, Badges, and Leaderboards). Earning stars or smiley faces is the same as earning points, points can be anything that you collect. This encourages competition between students as well as offering students the chance to master whichever trait is being awarded.

Stickers as I have mentioned before are another form of badges and are awarded for set goals or as additional achievements. While badges can still be collected they are not used to measure overall achievement, merely reward an instance of achievement.

Finally publishing openly, the attendance percentage for students where all other students can see acts in much the same way as a leader board with students keeping track of who is on top and who is never there. These are all examples I have experienced personally in my primary and secondary education. While I have used the example of attendance I have also head of test scores and other such data being published in much the same way. The only issue with this method is that it can dishearten students at the lower end of the scale and end up reducing engagement and enthusiasm (which happened to me with my attendance one year when I was off sick a fair bit). While I knew it was out of my control I still felt beaten by the system. With this in mind it is wise to have a “top ten” leaderboard rather than publishing openly the entire cohort.

A lot of these styles of elements link to each other and can be used to link many different sessions together, be it two or three lessons or an entire year. Another personal example was that badges were awarded to students who managed to attain 100% attendance and awards were offered for reaching mile stones with the star chard (either badges or sweets). These examples ran over the entire term, semester, or year and this gave students drive and motivation to continue to engage and achieve in their studies, giving them goals and purpose to their learning.

Going back to my post in March, Adding Gamification Elements, I can easily see how most elements would work when used to encompass an entire set of sessions. Here are a few examples I have come up with based around that initial list from Kapp (2014).

Goals: A target of points across the year can be given to attain a badge. Smaller goals can work better in a lot of situations in which mile stones are used rather than just the one goal. An example of this in use is here at UCS where the Students Union offers, via the Most Active Students scheme, rewards for attending set numbers of sessions. 2 sessions will get you a lanyard, 5 a sports bottle, 10 a sports shirt, 20 for a hoodie, 30 for a bag, 50 for a sports blender and 100 for a Bluetooth fitness tracker. It is important to remember to scale the rewards however as in this example a bag (widely considered less valuable than a hoodie) takes 30 sessions whereas the hoodie only takes 20. This means that students don’t overly care about getting the bag and the observed gap from 20 to 50 seems too much to encourage participation.

• Conflict and Competition: This is present with direct competition between individual students with leaderboards. It plays heavily on the mastery of subjects and will see students striving to be the best at everything. A good real world example of this is the title of Valedictorian in the United States. Students push hard to be bestowed the honour of this title and the honour of delivering the closing statement at the graduation ceremony.

• Cooperation: This can be used by giving students the choice of choosing teams that are persistent throughout the year. Be warned however, as allowances need to be made for students falling out and disagreeing on subjects. While this is a great way of getting the less involved students to participate, it can be difficult to police across an entire year. Shorter durations are advised.

• Feedback: This was a harder example to find however feedback that builds on previous feedback can be used to tie lessons together and increase motivation for good performance. The example that during the opening weeks of this gamification blog, our tutor would hand out weekly updates as feedback. These would be printed forms that contained all previous feedback and then the current feedback at the bottom. All feedback was sectioned off and highlighted red, amber, and green to represent not present, needs attention, and satisfactory. I found myself along with many other members of my cohort comparing how many greens, and this became a driving force each week, to try and get green across the board.

• Story Telling: This has already been covered but if you keep narratives running in cannon with each other, this will help to immerse the students and provides context for the learning.

• Scoring and PBL: While I have given examples of this above, I feel it is prudent to mention it again as it is the simplest to implement across multiple sessions. Using persistent leaderboards and points which accumulate over the course of a set amount of sessions will achieve the same driving force for students as I spoke about in the feedback section above. Again remember that when publishing these leaderboards and scores, it can be detrimental to the cause if students on the lower end are highlighted. That said it can still encourage students to do better when they are last, it is different learner to learner so tread carefully when talking about the lower end of the leader board.

Also on Leaderboards, Kapp (2014) states that learners should be allowed to customise their leaderboards to help form an attachment to them. An example of this would be using a card based leader board similar to those used in golf where each learner has their own card with their name and points etc. Each student should be able to customise their own card and even place their badges (stickers) on them to give students a way of showing off their achievements. Then all the cards can be pinned or tacked up on the wall in order of points (highest to lowest) and then dynamically changed lesson to lesson by re ordering the cards to reflect the newly attained points.